Prison, technology, and consumption: A visual study of the use of electronic commerce strategies in the inmate package industry
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221131571 |
| Author | Isabel Arriagada |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
Prison, technology, and
consumption: A visual study of
the use of electronic commerce
strategies in the inmate
package industry
Isabel Arriagada
University of Minnesota, USA
Abstract
In recent years, the US penal system has increasingly contracted prison services and
introduced electronic commerce technologies for penal populations and their social net-
works. This study uses visual and textual analysis of 245 images from the websites of 17
inmate package companies to explore electronic commerce strategies in US penal insti-
tutions. The inmate package industry uses electronic commerce strategies that address
the distinctive conditions of penal confinement and deploys emotionally charged mes-
sages to encourage digital interactions with the penal system and elicit consumption.
Several company websites also organize the experience of consumption along gender
and racial lines. The emergent industry of inmate packages represents one among several
contemporary practices of carceral consumption.
Keywords
e-commerce, websites, inmate packages, consumerism, criminal justice, visual criminology
Introduction
Inmate package websites are online platforms through which prisoners’friends and
family members can purchase consumer goods designed for and allowed within penal
Corresponding author:
Isabel Arriagada, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota—909 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th
Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Email: arria014@umn.edu
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(3) 457–480
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806221131571
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
facilities in the US. These companies provide their services to both prisons and jails,
which enables a potential market comprising the social networks of the more than 2
million incarcerated people (Sentencing Project, 2021). This industry is quite profitable;
Keefe Commissary Network, which along with Access Securepak is part of Keefe Group,
have reported net sales of over $375 million from care package, commissary, and tech-
nology programs (Eldridge, 2017). Although recent studies have theorized the role of
internet-based services in the criminal justice system (Gurusami, 2019; Gusejnova,
2013; Lageson, 2016), the development of digital technologies for penal facilities (Van
De Steene and Knight, 2017), and the dehumanizing perils of virtual communication
for incarcerated populations (Jewkes, 2015), the use of electronic commerce in the
penal system has only recently begun to be examined.
This study analyzes the visual and textual components of the websites of 17 inmate
package companies. It responds to the call for a critical visual criminology agenda that
addresses the production and representation of images in the public sphere (Brown,
2014; Brown and Carrabine, 2017; Schept, 2014). This study examines the choices com-
panies have made in designing the user experience on these websites, including text and
composition, and other visual attributes that create a symbolic universe for potential
users. I identify three emergent themes. First, companies purposefully use caring mes-
sages that allude to the deprivations of imprisonment, target loved ones’desires to
satisfy the specific requests of individual prisoners and construct new moral standards
of care for prisoners’social networks. Second, companies capitalize on the geographical
and temporal simplification and relocation of a particular sequence of activities—the bur-
densome preparation and shipment of a package—into a single-screen transaction. These
websites thus create a particular sense of ubiquity that redefines the spatial and temporal
dimensions of families’interactions with the penal system. Finally, visual strategies rely
on gender and racial stereotypes to create a welcoming environment for their imagined
population of consumers. Women of color emerge as the ideal target for carceral con-
sumption. This market creates a narrative of participation and involvement that contrasts
with the traditional exclusion that the penal system undertakes against poor communities
of color.
Analysis of advertisement in the penal field is not new. In her study “Selling ‘secur-
ityware’: Transformations in prison commodities advertising, 1949–1999”Mona Lynch
(2002) examined the marketing of prison products and services offered in the US by
private companies to prison administrators over a 50-year period. Her longitudinal ana-
lysis reveals a shift from commercial strategies that exalt the rehabilitative ideal to the
consolidation of messages of security and confinement. These changes stemmed from
a transformation of the products sold, as well as from new depictions of prisoners—
from individuals in need of rehabilitation to subjects that endanger penal facilities.
I argue that inmate package websites differ in two important ways from Lynch’s ana-
lysis. First, they represent a new era in the selling of prison commodities; now the audi-
ence for advertisements are prisoners and their families and not prison authorities per se.
Second, inmate package websites present a new depiction of prisoners and their families
that transcends their portrayals from the rehabilitation and the punitive eras. They are pre-
sented as sophisticated customers, with special needs and preferences. Images of prison-
ers as “patients”or as “criminals”are impractical to this purpose.
458 Theoretical Criminology 27(3)
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